You are on page 1of 7

Advanced Technology for Learning, Vol. 4, No.

4, 2007

PRODUCTIVE PLAY: PARTICIPATION AND LEARNING IN DIGITAL GAME ENVIRONMENTS


L. Galarneau

Abstract
Although there is considerable interest in the idea of using games for learning, success in this area has proven elusive. Clearly it is challenging to take established curricula developed for other media types and attempt to t them into open-ended game contexts where content is secondary to experience. Digital games are very eective for learning, but they represent a type of productive play that does not t neatly within established educational paradigms. Furthermore, play and learning take on new dimensions within the context of an increasingly participatory culture that blurs traditional boundaries between producers and consumers, as well as teachers and learners. In participatory contexts, learning is a systemic activity where the contributions of the individual contribute to the larger collective intelligence, and learning is often a by-product of play or creativity. Attempts to use games for learning must take this broader context into account and acknowledge the shifting expectations and emerging literacies of learners steeped in a digital culture that introduces and reinforces new standards for play and participation.

fore embracing play, within a rigorous educational context. Within the study of learning, in particular, games been plagued by exceptionalism, leading to a phenomenon in which they have been sold short by their unexamined and seemingly unbreakable conceptual association with play [1]. Solving this problem may be, as Malaby suggests, a matter of disassociating games from play. Or it may require a huge shift in our normative approach to play in general. Taylor notes that its association with the term fun . . . cedes the discussion of the pleasures of play to an overly dichotomized model in which leisure rests on one side and labour on the other [2]. 2. Play as a Critical Skill To overlook play as a critical component of the human experience is to miss an opportunity to leverage an inherent human capability for learning that is also a drive rooted in basic survival strategies. Sutton-Smith underscores his belief that play is a fundamental human need with the supposition that the opposite of play is not work, its depression [3]. Play is not an optional leisure activity, but a biological imperative that supports our cognitive and emotional well being, occupying an important role in our development as humans. As Dibbell puts it, play is to the 21st century what steam was to the 20th century [4]. In other words, play is a productive phenomenon and as such, a harnessable resource: play can be explicitly leveraged for production, as in the case where South African childrens play on a merry-go-round has been harnessed to pump water [5], or in the case of the ESP game (Fig. 1) in which players volunteer to provide meta-tagging services for images by playing a web-based game [6]. Play also serves as a motivating force, but it is most powerfully an apparatus for allowing experimentation outside of limitations of physical practicality or other opportunity barriers, e.g. the diculty of training for natural disasters, that arise from needing to develop competency in an area that is highly dependent on experiences that are not frequently encountered. Harnessing the human predilection to play and learn from both real and virtual experience may be a necessity within contexts where relevant and directly applicable activity, a mainstay of the adult learning process [7], is missing. Play, and games in particular, can create an authentic learning 1

Key Words
Learning, education, digital games, participatory culture, participation, play

1. Introduction The movement associated with videogames for learning has evolved uncomfortably from a category called edutainment to one called serious games, both terms that are clearly rather awkward oxymorons, reecting an inherent tension in the way we view play and its possibilities for learning. Yet attention to such a basic human (and indeed, animal) activity as play cannot be trivialized, despite our collective and seemingly pervasive discomfort with the notion that play is fundamentally antithetical to work. This has led us to a point where we are both fascinated and frightened by the possibilities of using games, and thereDepartment of Screen and Media, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3500, Hamilton, New Zealand; e-mail: lisa@socialstudygames.com (paper no. 208-0924)

Figure 1. The ESP game (http://www.espgame.org) matches anonymous players and creates a game environment in which they are challenged to agree on words that might describe an image. This data is subsequently used to create a repository of image meta-data, an invaluable tool for image searching. Taboo words are words that have been agreed upon by players in previous game sessions.

context by simulating experiences that are inconvenient or impossible to produce using other means [8]. Much of the recent confusion regarding play and its role in human production comes from our collective observation that there is much work that feels like play and indeed, especially in the realm of videogames, much play that looks to many observers strangely like work. The levelling treadmill in many role-playing games, also referred to as the grind, is a case in point. As Taylor notes in Play Between Worlds, the simple idea of fun is turned on its head by examples of engagement that rest on eciency, (often painful) learning, rote and boring tasks, heavy doses of responsibility, and intensity of focus [2]. In this sense, play is not a discrete activity as dened by theorists like Caillois [9] and Huizinga [10], so much as a mode of experience [11] characterized by enjoyment of the pursuit of game goals, but more akin to a description of ow [12] than to a simple description of one engaged in leisure activities completely disassociated from work. Play, as a state, is simply an opportunity for unfocused, openended experimentation, often in an environment that has been designed to allow for a range of experiences, some prescribed, but some almost entirely emergent. It is no longer the case, if indeed it ever was, that play is carefully isolated from the rest of life [9]. As such, motivating people to learn can simply mean aording them a context in which productive activity feels like play and allows for the cognitive and creative freedoms associated with open2

ended experimentation. With respect to this alternative framing, rather than to say that one is at play it would be more descriptive to say that one is in play, i.e., one is carving out a space in which experimentation is safe and possible this state is non-linear, unfocused on a particular end result, and allows for creative thinking, innovative problem solving, and shifts in perspective [1315]. These shifts in perspective may be one of the most salient features of this sort of open-ended experimentation, allowing gamers to go meta, or view situations or problems from various angles [16]. For example, unexpectedly viewing the immunological system of the human body from the perspective of a virus, as in the game Replicate, might give one a whole new take on a situation: in the words of plant geneticist Barbara McClintock, a feeling for the organism that forms the basis of an intimate knowledge of a phenomenon, allowing one to pivot ones mind to view the issue from myriad directions [17]. Likewise, the web-based game September 12th (Fig. 2) provides a context in which players can experience a novel perspective on terrorism. This is an epistemic frame that can be written into a game as a mechanism through which students can use experiences in video games, computer games, and other interactive learning environments to help them deal more eectively with situations outside of the original context of learning [18]. Furthermore, once this state or frame has been experienced, it can be recalled at will, even outside of an explicit play activity. Extending the virus example,

Figure 2. The web-based game, September 12th, encourages players to think about terrorism from a novel perspective. a doctor who has played a virus may continue to have the ability to think like one, simply by recalling the experience of shifting to that point of view. 3. Play as Participation While it seems intuitive that there must be a way to co-opt the enthusiastic engagement and motivation for learning that is readily apparent when one observes videogame play, the formula for widespread success has remained out of reach. Part of the problem is that the appeal of multimedia, including videogames, has often been emphasized relative to the sophisticated graphics and fast pace of the images [19, 20], a perspective rooted in notions of media spectatorship. However, the appeal of videogames to people of all ages is more about the interaction(s) created around the game than the game itself; indeed, some researchers consider games to not be inherently interactive at all [21]; it is the player(s) who create(s) the interaction. The idea of player-driven interaction being key to engagement and learning [22, 23] underscores the importance of framing the appeal of videogames and interactive media within a larger conversation that considers the movement away from passive, spectator-oriented understandings of both education and media. There has been a shift from didactic, teaching-oriented approaches in education to constructivist models that acknowledge the need for the active participation of the learner in the process of learning. A similar evolution has occurred in media studies, where reactionary models like encoding/decoding [24] that sought to outline an unbalanced, hegemonic relationship between media producers and consumers, gave way to an empirically based acknowledgment of the variety of uses and gratications [25] employed by media consumers, and are now 3 evolving into more fully illustrated examples of a participatory culture (e.g. 2, 2630) that was heretofore only suspected. Along with this perspective has come an increased awareness that the issues and opportunities surrounding media cannot be understood using old paradigms. Games, particularly co-created online game worlds, are especially problematic because it is impossible to read them simply as texts; the experience of playing a game is co-produced and continuously negotiated between developer and player: The particularity of games as media texts rests on the fact that they cannot be only read or watched but they must be played. Thus, the creative involvement of the player becomes a fundamental feature of any game [27]. As a media form, therefore, games can only be understood within the panorama of an increasingly participatory media culture: A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing ones creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created) [31]. As demonstrated by the Web 2.0 hype and the associated fascination with blogs, wikis, shared video, social networking sites and other collaborative forms, participation has turned out to be a fundamental and compelling characteristic of digital domains. The particularly notable aspect of this shift from spectator-focused media consumption to

Figure 3. A screenshot from the World of Warcraft -based machinima lm called /dance. Players choreograph actual game play scenes into short narratives or music videos that they then distribute on shared video sites like YouTube.

active participation is that people who have experienced a media relationship of the latter sort come to expect those sorts of options, if not always, then at least when they want it: Participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands [32]. Not only have young people come to expect the freedom to make contributions to the media spaces they inhabit, but co-creation and production have also become critical skills that may dierentiate consumers [who] have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others [32]. It is no longer a straightforward matter that fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to inuence entertainment industrys decisions [28]. The eects of increasingly skilled participation from amateurs on the entire media machine from journalism to the music industry illuminate a dialogue that has emerged between producers and consumers, resulting in the co-creation of media properties that span and simul4

taneously reinforce both commercial and non-commercial contributions. Though many examples are emerging, videogames may well present the most interesting examples of emerging participatory cultures. Game modding and machinima (Fig. 3) are both examples of the activities of players who take commercial game assets, and with the co-operation of game developers, act as amateur developers by making and distributing changes to the game or leveraging game assets to create narrative lms. Unlike the early days of fan production, consumers no longer have to exclusively poach assets [28], but are instead allowed varying levels of sanctioned access to the elements necessary for coproduction. In online game worlds, the exible parameters specied by game designers involve creating the basis for an emergent world where environments are in constant ux: rules change, documentation is scarce, and the mastery of the game relies on a host of skills well beyond the games manual. Indeed, these games and the strategies for playing them, are exercises in co-creation where players, as co-producers of the entire game play environment, can inuence the rules, aect the outcome, and create a rich universe of social interactions, emergent activity, and culture that ultimately become the core of game play rather than the periphery: these are worlds in which game-

ness is deeply woven together with the social and the co-constructive work of players [2]. It seems intuitive that denying meaningful interaction, as is the case with most educational environments, to learners who have become accustomed to the pleasures of participation and contribution, might be the source of much of the consternation we experience as we attempt to motivate students using outdated models that assume passivity: We are coming to understand that what we so valued as an attention span is something entirely dierent from what we thought. As practiced, an attention span is not a power of concentration or self-discipline in the least, but rather a measure of a viewers susceptibility to the hypnotic eects of linear programming. The well-behaved viewer who listens quietly, never talks back to the screen, and never changes channels, is learning what to think and losing his grasp on how to think [original emphasis]. . . . Helping to convince ourselves that our lives could run smoothly and easily if we simply followed instructions [33]. Rushkos insight could as easily apply to our notions of learners as it does to television viewers, as it is tied directly to 20th century models of people as consumers. People are passive, uncritical vessels to be lled with stu: propaganda, programming, content, curricula, desire for the latest and greatest gizmo. When this lling up is appropriate, a persons only responsibility is to be open to it by paying attention the rest just happens magically. The dark side of this, of course, is that people if people are so accustomed to this process, they can also be easily lled with all sorts of other things, like murky political messages and other by-products of hegemonies and commercial agendas wrapped in pretty, entertaining packages. As we know people are susceptible to this, the conventional wisdom is to use games to serve up learning in a nicer package, thereby seducing learners to learn. However, this is a view that obscures the broader potential of games and play in learning.

4. Participation and Learning Despite a great deal of fascination with learner-centred (if not learner-driven) constructivist learning, the vast majority of formal educational opportunities are still unilaterally decided and created by some educational body that decides what a learner must know: those things that are immediately relevant to an individuals life are deemed largely inconsequential. Likewise the majority of eorts to use games in education do not take into account our changing understanding of people as media participants rather than consumers. Notions of teaching and learning are equivalent to notions of media producers and consumers. And this eect, once experienced, is not limited to media, but pervades a range of expectations about participation, especially an increasing drive to seek autonomy and relevance in ones educational endeavours. Herein lies the quandary: acknowledging games as participatory forms, 5

then attempting to use them in an educational context means having to reconcile the increasingly participatory sensibility that young people bring to all of their interactions. To be told what needs to be learned is fundamentally at odds with this type of approach. Part of the process of participation is co-creating the system: guidance from en expert educator is always useful, but if a learner has no input into what is to be learned, has no say in choosing what is relevant to their individual life, there is no motivation to learn. Placing the irrelevant in a slightly more appealing package is a short-term strategy at best. To fully leverage the potential of digital games for learning, it is imperative to recognize that these environments demand approaches to learning that privilege play and production over traditional models of serving content in a more appealing package. To eectively use a videogame for learning means using the game as a site for learning, not simply as a means of delivery. It means using the game as a tool to create a learning context with broad objectives: the specics of what is learned might vary considerably from learner to learner and might span a range of competencies. It may be necessary to memorize particular facts to accomplish the goals, or even develop skills like problem solving. However, the real opportunity is in learning to be, to foster varied or deeper perspectives, like what it feels like to not simply know the steps of the scientic method, but to employ it as part of a rigorous scientic belief system and get results that allow one to see the world dierently [34]. To this point, Thomas and Seely Brown reference Deweys play of the imagination: learning a set of dispositions or comportment in a world is more likely to transfer than specic bits of knowledge [35]. The opportunity provided by play is potentially transformative, and may trivialize specic content expertise [36]. Content will continue to be important, but with the right perspective, a learner can pick and choose what needs to reside in ones head and what can be acquired on a more ad hoc basis. This approach encourages the learner to take responsibility for the specics of ones learning within a framework of overarching goals. This is precisely the area in which games really shine. There are particular things that need to be learned in the pursuit of game goals. An educator can create a context, for instance, in which an intimate knowledge of Greek architecture and language become fundamental to understanding a virtual environment well enough to win a game. Similarly, a context can be created in which teamwork and communication must be eective in order for a group of players to work together to achieve a particular goal. In typically constructivist fashion, it is incumbent upon the educator to understand the various moving parts within a system, anticipate learner responses, and loosely craft an experience that meets the learning objectives. The assessment is based on whether the overall objectives have been met. It is then the responsibility of the learner to ll in the gaps provided by the openness of the experience, and this plays well into the co-production sensibility. Learners can be given a larger set of directives and various tools and resources to access information they think is relevant to the directives; it gives the learners an important sense

of autonomy while also being forced to sort through a complex set of options, mimicking problem solving in the real world. In addition, learners have the opportunity to form connections between the content they acquired and the experience that allows them to integrate it more fully; the latest thinking in neuroscience speculates that this is a critical aspect of forming a pattern that can later be applied to a dierent situation without relying heavily on strict protocols or procedures [37]. Furthermore, the creation of loose game-based learning contexts allows for identity transformations that are not possible within more closed, content-oriented learning systems but may clear the way to signicant learning. In Squires work with low-income and minority students who played Civilization III as part of a world history unit, the rst hurdle to be overcome was the students basic concept of the validity of history and their distrust, as marginalized people, in the various themes and facts they were exposed to in history classes. The ability to participate in simulations of historical or quasi-historical events from a range of perspectives was an important rst step, indeed a critical one, in forming a basic interest and acceptance of history, and realizing that our understanding of history is informed and continuously revised by myriad points of view. It is this thinking like a historian that becomes that transformative factor: this is a participatory practice, even if only in the play environment. And once the learner has the sense of being a participant in history and the investigation of history, the door is opened to learning and thinking critically about it. This is where the real promise of digital games lies: involving learners in a productive process of participatory play, guided by an educational agenda, but driven by the learners themselves. Squires work shows how this approach can accommodate a wide array of learning needs and socio-cultural contexts: Looking at who wins and loses through a game-based curriculum reminds us that curricular issues are also about power and control. A curriculum based on Civilization III overturns traditional hierarchies, supplanting those adept in traditional schooling with those failing school. The successful students were concerned that their more traditional school-based expertise was not honored in this classroom, and they were not convinced that success in a game-based unit would help them on college entrance exams or in college classrooms, both of which rely on more traditional literacies. They believed that Civilization III was insucient preparation for the game of higher education, and perhaps they were correct. Yet, students who were failing in school (or whom school was failing) developed and demonstrated complex understandings within a game-based curriculum that go undeveloped or unrecognized in other school experiences [38]. 5. Conclusion Success in the realm of game-based learning hinges on a deep understanding of emerging digital cultures and the 6

role of play in our lives. Awareness of these evolving areas will surely help inform our understanding of the systemic nature of learning, its connection to productive play in an increasingly interconnected world, and the place that game-based learning occupies within such a system. A deep holistic understanding of game play trends and player habits across both oine and online games, as well as ongoing attention to the larger backdrop of participatory practices, will both be critical to our success in helping realize the promise of videogames to learning, both in formal educational settings and informal learning contexts where self-discovery and development might be of interest. In fact, this might emerge as the sweet spot for videogames: tools for self-directed learning in a world where learners increasingly guide the direction of their learning, co-creating relevant educational scenarios with the assistance of educational faculty, but with an eye towards using a range of digital resources to achieve the sorts of goals that can be powerfully explored through safe experimentation in digital play spaces. References
[1] T. Malaby, Stopping play: a new approach to games, 2006. [2] T.L. Taylor, Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2006). [3] B. Sutton-Smith, Video conference with Brian Sutton-Smith and Eric Zimmerman, Digital Games Research Association Conf., 2004. [4] J. Dibbell, The social dimensions of digital gaming. Presented at Game Developers Conf., San Jose, 2006. [5] A. Costello, South Africa: The play pump: Turning water into childs play, 2005, Available from: http://www.pbs.org/ frontlineworld/rough/2005/10/south_africa_th.html. [6] L. Von Ahn, Human computation, in Google TechTalk, 2006. [7] M.S. Knowles, The modern practice of adult education: From pedagogy to andragogy (Cambridge: Cambridge Adult Education, 1980). [8] L. Galarneau, Authentic learning experiences through play: Games, simulations and the construction of knowledge. Presented at Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conf., Vancouver, Canada, 2005. [9] R. Caillois, Man, play and games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1958). [10] J. Huizinga, Homo ludens (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1950). [11] T. Malaby, Terra Nova: Veblenesque dorodango? discussion, 2006, Available from: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_ nova/2006/08/veblenesque_dor.html. [12] M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). [13] K.H. Rubin, G.G. Fein, & B. Vandenberg, Play, in Handbook of child psychology (John Wiley and Sons, 1983), 693774. [14] C.S. Dweck & E.S. Elliot, Handbook of child psychology: Socialization, personality, and social development (New York: Wiley, 1983). [15] J.L. Dansky, Make-believe: A mediator of the relationship between play and associative uency, in Child Development (1980), 576579. [16] J.C. Beck & M. Wade, Got game? How the gamer generation is reshaping business forever (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004). [17] E.F. Keller, A feeling for the organism (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1983). [18] D.W. Shaer, Epistemic frames for epistemic games, in Computers and Education (2006). [19] R. Heinich, M. Molenda, J.D. Russell, & S.E. Smaldino, Instructional media and technologies for learning, Fifth Edition (Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996). [20] R.E. Mayer, Multimedia learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[21] J. Newman, The myth of the ergodic videogame, Game Studies, 2 (1), 2002, 117. [22] K. Swan, Building learning communities in online courses: The importance of interaction. Distance Education, 22 (2), 2002, 306331. [23] R.E. Mayer & P. Chandler, When learning is just a click away: Does simple user interaction foster deeper understanding of multimedia messages? Journal of Educational Psychology, 93 (2), 2001, 390397. [24] S. Hall, Encoding/decoding, in Culture, media, language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128140. [25] A.M. Rubin, Media uses and eects: A uses-and-gratications perspective, in D.Z.J. Bryant (Ed.), Media Eects: Advances in Theory and Research (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, NJ, 1994, 417436. [26] R. Blood, Weblogs and journalism in the age of participatory media, 2003, Available from: http://www.rebeccablood.net/ essays/weblogs_journalism.html#content. [27] O. Sotamaa, Computer game modding, intermediality and participatory culture (2004). [28] H. Jenkins, Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). [29] K. Squire, Star Wars Galaxies: A case study in participatory design (2001). [30] J. Raessens, Computer games as participatory media culture, in Handbook of computer game studies (2004), 373388. [31] H. Jenkins et al., Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st Century (2006). [32] H. Jenkins, Convergence culture (New York/London: New York University Press, 2006). [33] D. Rushko, Playing the future: How kids culture can teach us to thrive in an age of chaos (New York: Harper Collins, 1996). [34] J.P. Gee, Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines. Presented at Game Developers Conf., San Jose, California, 2004. [35] J. Seely Brown & D. Thomas. Play of the imagination. Presented at Games Learning Society, Madison, Wisconsin, 2006.

[36] J. Mezirow, Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997 (74), 1997, 512. [37] J. Hawkins, On intelligence (New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt and Co, 2004). [38] K. Squire, Changing the game: What happens when video games enter the classroom. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 1 (6), 2005.

Biography Lisa Galarneau is a doctoral candidate in New Zealands University of Waikato Screen and Media Studies department and a researcher in the Universitys post-graduate games research lab. Leveraging previous academic work in education and sociocultural anthropology, as well as extensive professional experience in online learning design and development, her research is looking at social learning associated with virtual worlds. In addition, she is an award-winning new media producer and is currently contracted at Microsoft Games User Research while nalizing her dissertation, due for completion in late 2007.

You might also like